Showcasing Logos in 3D with Blender

[Music] Hello, Gary Simon of designcourse.com and today is January 5th with our fifth video of 2014. We're sticking with the 365 videos in 365 days thing and today you're going to learn a little bit of 3D. So, we're going to download an application called Blender, and it is 100% free. It's only about 50 or 60 megabytes. I forget which it is. It's very small. And the installation process is very easy as well. So, I'll tell you where to go get that uh in just a few minutes. But first, I what we're going to use this for is to showcase logos in a 3D environment on a glass surface. So, in about a minute or so, I'll show you the end result and it looks really awesome. Uh, so I'm really excited about this and definitely do it. Don't let the fact that it's a new piece of software discourage you. Stick with this video and by the end you're going to be really impressed and maybe even really inspired to learn something new such as 3D. All right, so before we begin, as always, visit designcourse.com. uh put in your email, check out what's there, and also the source files and the project files and everything are available for free in the link in the description below this video. So, let's go ahead and get started. This is what the end result will look like. Okay, so if you don't have Blender installed, go to blender.org/down. /d download and you'll see this page here. And depending on which operating system you have, go ahead and download the installer version uh depending on whether or not you have a 64 or 32-bit operating system. And go ahead once after downloaded, install it. The in installation is very quick. And once you have it installed, load it up. And you'll be presented with this view right here. So the first thing right off the bat I want to do is just save this project. So, we're going to go to file, save, and I'm going to call this just showcase 3D.Blend. All right. So, right off the bat, there's a few things that you need to know if you're 100% new to Blender. Uh, the way you select an object is by right-clicking it, not left clicking, just right clicking. So, by default, it puts in this light source right here and a camera and this cube. Uh to rotate the view, you hold your middle mouse button. And to zoom in or zoom out, you use your scroll scroll wheel. And then if you want to pan, you hold shift and that middle mouse button like that. So I'll be using that. And really, it's just a matter of muscle memory. So if it seems like I'm moving fast, you can just pause it. And the only way to really get good with this stuff is to just by practicing it quite a bit. So anyhow, um, now what we want to do is just delete this cube. So we can hit delete key or X. I'm just going to hit delete and enter. And we want to add a plane. So if we go to add mesh plane, it will add that. And we can also access that same menu by hitting shift and A, which I will do from now on. So you see it adds this plane right here. What we want to do is rotate this by 90°. on the x- axis. So to do that, we hit R and we hit X and then we hit 90 and hit enter. All right. So I'm just going to move it up along the Z-axis real quick. And then I want to duplicate this. So this object right here, this plane is actually going to be what where the logo is showcased. It's going to be a glass panel basically. So I want to have a kind of like a wall behind it. So to do that, we're going to hit shift D to duplicate. And if we just move this around, don't click. You'll see that it doesn't stay on the axis. So if we want it to stay on this Y axis, we hit Y. And there we go. So we're just going to have it maybe, you know, pretty close. Maybe right around there. And then we're to scale it up. So we can hit S. And we can just drag this up however high we want. or you can put an actual number value to duplicate it or replicate it that many times or multiply rather. So I'm just going to go right around here. It doesn't really matter if you're you're you know perfect there. And now we have our two planes and we can see our first one here and then the big wall behind it. All right. So now what I want to do is give both of these a texture. So if I take this column over here and drag it out, we see all these different tabs. The one we want is this one. And with the wall selected, we'll go ahead and first make sure cycles render is selected from this menu up here. We'll hit new. And we'll just leave this at a white color and diffuse. And then we will go ahead and rightclick to select our glass and do the same thing. So now I want to set up our camera view. So to get to the camera view right now you see we're in user perspective mode. To get to camera view we'll hit the zero key on the number pad and basically everything within this box will be rendered. So what we want to do is go to view properties and then over here click on lock camera to view and you'll see it becomes a red outline and then go to view properties to get rid of that window. And basically this allows us to move the camera view uh exactly how we want to. So basically we want to be right around here when we render. So this is the glass panel basically that will be rendered when we do this. So if we want to render we can go over here just to see what everything currently looks like. Uh and I want to make a few adjustments. First, I'm going to change my device to GPU compute. That makes everything go a lot faster because it use it uses both of my graphics cards to render instead of the processor. And I'm going to go down here to sampling. I'm going to change render from 10 to 100. Basically, the higher this number is, the better the quality. However, it will take a little bit longer. Um, so now what I'm going to do is just hit render. And this is it. It's not all that impressive at all. You can see our Well, it's not glass yet, but this is what it will look like. So, I you can hit the escape key to get rid of that. And I'm going to switch out of the camera perspective by simply hitting the zero key once again. And that gives us basically to our last point. So, if we hit uh camera view again, it goes back to wherever we left it. All right. So, now what we want to do, this part's going to be just a little bit difficult. Uh but I'm going to back up real quick. First, we want to go to world and just change the the basically it's this color to white. So, the change that that makes, if we go back to the camera view, hitting zero, and hit render, everything is a lot brighter now. Okay, so back to that confusing part. If you've never used Blender and this is your first time, you're probably going to get discouraged, but don't worry. I mean, this is just for the purpose of this video uh and in this tutorial. And this is something you know once you do it once you'll be able to reuse this project file for showcasing future logos or whatever you want uh in the future. So what we want to do is get this uh glass panel actually looking glass and actually displaying a logo. So doing it requires tampering with what's called the node editor. So let's go ahead real quick and do that. I'm going to hit tab or not tab rather. I'm going to hit zero to get out of here. And I'm going to take this little icon. You can see when we hover over that and leftclick and drag to the right. Now, that gives us basically two different views and it basically duplicates whatever view you pulled it from. So, they're both right now exactly the same. Uh, if we come over here, this will allow us to change what is displayed over here. So, what we want over there is the node editor. So, if we use our mouse wheel, we can uh kind of zoom up here. And I'm going to push this over here a little bit more so we can get a better look at what's going on. This right here, we can kind of see we can move this around. Uh these can actually get very large and they allow us to basically control the appearance of whichever object we happen to be selected. So if we wanted to select this background wall, we can see it has its own and then this one as well. So I when I first saw this when I started learning uh Blender, which really was only about a month or two ago, I was like, what is this? You know, because it looks so foreign. So don't let that deter you. Um, basically we have to set this up uh and go through a number of steps uh in order to get this to work correctly. So if we hold control on the keyboard and we leftclick and drag, that will just basically separate this connection. We want to add a shader. So we go down here and we go to add shader. And we want to add a mix shader. and we're going to put that right around here. So, basically, a mix shader will allow you to add two different types of shaders. And we want to connect this shader right here to the surface right there. All right. So, next, what we want to do is take the diffuse. We're going to put it down here. And we're going to take this point and connect it to the bottom shader right there. Now, we want to add a glass shader. So, we go over to add shader and then select glass and we'll put it right here. So, we'll connect this portion to the bottom right there. So, now we have our two different uh shaders worked in here. So, let's just scroll over here a little bit. And now we need to add our image texture. So, this would be our logo that we want to add. So, we go to add texture, image texture. We'll put it right here. And we want to take the color and drag it down here to diffuse. And then we want to hit open to open up our data logo.png, which will be linked in the project files, um, which you can access in the description beneath this video. And once you have that open, now we want to take alpha and we want to connect it all the way to this FAC pointer on the mix shader. Now there's only one more that we need to add and that is add input and texture coordinate. Now I know this all sounds insane. You have no idea what's going on, but that's okay. Uh we'll go to UV and connect it down here to vector. All right. So, that is all we have to do for this setup right here. So, it looks like alien. Like I said, uh you don't have to worry about it right now. Uh if you ever want to reuse this um this project to showcase logos or whatever, you know, just save this and you're not going to have to worry about this stuff. And of course, there's tons of tutorials um on YouTube and if you do a Google search on, you know, h how to really figure out how all this stuff works, but just for our purpose, uh this would be good enough. So, you don't have to have a great understanding of it. Um now, what we want to do, I'm going to u combine these windows here. So, I'm going to take this and just drag it over here to the right. And you'll see that arrow that kind of overlaps and go right there. So, you would think, okay, maybe now if we go to render, um, we'll be able to see our glass texture or whatever. Uh, that's not the case, though. But just real quickly, I will hit, uh, zero to get into camera view. We'll hit render, and nothing shows up. It is a glass texture, but the actual decal isn't set up. And I'll tell you how to fix that. So, if we hit escape, and we go to I'm going to hit zero just to get out of there. and make sure making sure this is currently selected by right-clicking it. We'll go to edit mode. And you can get there also by hitting tab. And if you hit A and A again, you just make sure everything is currently selected. And it will be if it's all orange. Uh, and what we have to do is scroll down here and we have to go to unwrap and then select unwrap. All right. So now if we get out of edit mode, we'll hit tab just to go back into object mode and we hit zero on the number pad and we hit render. Now we'll see uh this image right here. So it doesn't look quite right though uh because it's kind of up against, you know, the edges of this. So we're going to go ahead and fix that. So, what we'll do is hit escape to get out of there. And we're going to get out of Photoshop. So, go ahead and load up Photoshop. And we're going to go to file, new, and we have to make sure the width and height are 1024x 1024. We'll hit okay. And it's obviously a pretty large image. I'm only at 50% view. And if you if you do have a white background, you can just uh delete that or just go to file, new, and where it says background contents, usually by default it's set at white or your background color, change that to transparent. All right, so you have a transparent background. And then we want to open up that logo, which is Dana logo. Hit control A, then C, and then Ctrl +V to paste it in here. and hit CtrlT and hold shift and alt and we could scale it down right around here. So basically anything that's going to be inside of this container here or this image will be displayed on that glass uh piece. So let's go ahead and save for web. So save for web. We see the shortcut here. And I'm going to make it PNG 24 transparent. And save this Dana logo. We'll just call this two. And I'm going to wait. My hard drive is being a little bit slow. All right. And now what I'm going to do is go back to Blender. And now what I'm going to do, we're going to go back to that UV or the the node editor rather. And I'm just going to zoom up here real quick. And we can just click this icon under the image image texture node and Dana logo-2. That's what we want. All right. So let's get that back over here. And now let's hit render. And now it's set on there much better. Okay. So, while this result is pretty cool, I we can do some things to improve it. So, I'm going to hit escape. And now I'm going to go to hit zero. And I'm going to zoom out here a little bit. I'm going to add a emission plane. So, I'm just going to collect click rather uh the left mouse button right around here kind of by the uh camera and I'm going to go to add mesh plane and I want to rotate it so it's kind of facing uh our glass portion. So, I'm going to hit R and we're going to do see if X is it. Yep, X and then 45 and hit enter. All right. So over here, we're going to give it a texture and or a material and hit new. And we're going to choose emission, which is right there. So emission, we have a color option, and I'm going to leave it at white. And strength, which is one, which is kind of not very strong. So I'm going to choose 10. All right. So, if we hit zero on the number key, go back and we hit render, you'll see it slightly lightens things up. Um, but also, let me escape out of there. Hit zero. If we want to drop this down a little bit on the Z-axis, we'll see what happens. Then, we'll render it again. Usually I have a reflection on here, but I I think I have to adjust things a little bit more. Let me escape. Okay. And I just pause the video so I can play around with getting that into the correct position so we can see a reflection of that light source of of the uh plane emission. And I was able to get it to show kind of right up here. I So if I hit zero on the number pad, this is kind of where I moved it. You may have to play around just to get that same effect. And uh we can even add multiple uh planes up here. So if we hit shift D and we move this on the X axis by hitting X, we can put one right there. We can go back to the camera view and hit render. And we'll see we have the second one showing there. That's just way it just kind of gives us a little bit more uh I guess realism if you could say. Um, you could choose to leave that out if you want. Although you you have to realize that when you do duplicate that, you increase the light strength. Uh, so that's something to keep in mind. Um, so let me escape out of here. And I'm going to just zoom up once by um using my mouse wheel. I think it looks better if I zoom it up here just a little bit more. All right. And I just wanted to show a couple other things um that we could do and you know really play around with and and make this look cool. Uh so if I hit esca escape and we get back to user perspective uh we can do a couple things. So let's select the actual glass and if we go into edit mode, we hit tab or we go we choose it manually. There you'll see that basically we zoom up here. This is just a very simple it has no depth to it. So we can actually create some depth by hitting the E key which means extrude. So now we're giving it some depth. So depending on how big you want to make it. If you make it real thick it may not work out as you want. But if we make it pretty thin and hit basically the left mouse button to solidify that uh selection. If we go back to tab and we hit zero and we hit render, you can see what sort of happens here. It basically I by giving it depth, it creates kind of like a shadow on the back portion of that glass piece. Now, if that's something that you don't want, you can kind of leave that step out. Um, I just wanted to show another thing real quick. go back to zero. Let's say, for example, uh we wanted to add something that made it look like this is actually connected to the wall, like maybe like little like four little cylinders. So, we can do that real quickly. We're going to I'm going to click right around here by left clicking and like right here. Okay. So, basically, wherever this little cursor is, that's where a new object will be added. So, if we hit shift A and add a cylinder, as you can see, it's real big. So, if I hit S and scale this down quite a bit. And we want to rotate it so it's facing this way. So, R. Yeah. X and 90. And then hit enter. So now right now it's kind of it's it's a lot fatter than I would want it to be. So let's go ahead and hit S and scale that down quite a bit more. And then if we hit S again and we'll choose Y, we can scale this up just to right around here. All right. So, real quickly, I if you use your number pad and you hit one, that gives us a front perspective. And I also like to hit five on the number pad. And that changes us to front ortho. Uh if you hit seven, we're still in ortho mode. B. And basically that means uh whenever you're trying to model you're you're trying to work with uh modeling something it allows you to select the vertices um in orthographic mode opposed to a perspective mode. Uh if that's confusing you don't really have to worry about that right now. Uh but anyhow the top top view is seven and then three is right. So by switching between these modes we can use these anchors to really position it a little bit better. Uh, and also if we wanted to switch this to a wireframe so we can see things. Uh, so if we go like one for example, we wouldn't be able to see this because but in the uh solid mode because these this light source right here is in the way. So that's just something to keep in mind. So if we go to wireframe, we want to move this around so it's kind of more even. We can do so. And now we want to do is give this an actual texture. So if we go over here, we hit new and we can go ahead and we can just give this a let's try giving it a glossy. And we'll try like right around here like a gray. All right. Now we can go ahead and duplicate this. Shift D. And we will keep that on the Z-axis by hitting Z. And then shift D again and hit X. Go right around here. And I'm just panning, remember by shift and your middle mouse button. And then shift D once more and hit Z and click right around there. Okay. All right. So now if we switch back to solid here, let's go ahead and hit the zero key and let's go to render. You can now see it has this little, you know, I'm not sure if you would actually want to use that, but really I'm just trying to show you guys some just cool things. Uh so with a very little amount that you learned here, you actually learned a ton because uh you can do so many different cool things um with what you learned. So for example, just to show you another thing, we hit escape and hit zero to get out of here. If we wanted to change the color of these two things, hold shift and rightclick both of those and go over here to material. We could change our color. Let's try like like a blue right around here. Like a light blue. And we'll go back to zero for our camera view. And we'll render this and see what happens. You can see now everything kind of has more of a bluish tint. Whether or not you like that, uh, that's up to you. But as you can see, you can just play around with stuff so much and it makes it look really cool. Um, so just one final thing I'm going to get out of here. I really don't like those cylinders, so I'm going to select them all real quick and just delete them. Delete. And then I'm going to change both of these back here to white. And then for the final render, you know, when you're really ready ready to render a good looking image, you want to make sure you come de back down to where's that at? Sampling. And for render for something to get something really good, I mean a th00and would be ideal. So I'm going to hit 1,000. And I'm going to leave it at that. I'm going to hit the zero key to get back into the camera view. And then I'm going to go ahead and render this. Now, because I selected a th00and, it's going to take quite a bit longer for this to get going. So, I'm just going to pause until it's fully completed. And then I'll unpause it. And this is what it came up with. Though, I should probably tell you that I adjusted a couple things I while I was pausing it because I first let me hit escape here. Um, what I realized is when I changed these two colors over here, I only changed this value. This was still over here as blue. So, make sure if you want to go to hex, just change that to 6Fs. And that's the hex color code for white. And I also removed the thickness that was on the glass because it just gave this shadow. I didn't really like it. Um, so yeah, no big deal there. Um, so another thing real quickly I want to show. So, uh, that looked real good, of course, with that logo. Um, just to show you what it looks like with a different logo. If you bring up Photoshop again, we go to file, open here. We'll try the DC logo that's in the project files. Control arr to copy that. And then we'll go ahead and control A and delete everything there by hitting the delete key. And then Ctrl +V, CRLT, hold shift and alt, and scale that down. We'll save this by saving for web. I'll just do the shortcut here. Save. And we'll call this DC logo-2. And we go back here to Blender and we get out of there. The way we change that again is if we select our here. Let me It's hard to see. They're like the same color. Uh, if we select this again, bring out our other window, go back to node editor, we zoom up here with our scroll wheel, hit open DC logo-2. Get this back over here. Hit zero. Go back to render. Although I want to Yeah, I'll let it render for uh the high um 10,00 samples. And then I'll just I'll pause this and unpause it once it's done. And here it is after it got done rendering. And really that took about a minute and a half or two. I And once again, it looks pretty freaking awesome. So I once you have a render that you like and you want to save it, you just hit F3. So we'll just call this final DC render. And it gives you the options to change uh you know, right now it's at PNG. If we change this to like a JPEG, put the quality up to 100% or whatever you want. Uh, and then just hit save as image and then you're you're done. You got your image. Um, so I hope that was this was a good uh video tutorial and introduction kind of to Blender. Although there are probably better more generalized introductions like you know understanding the interface and all that stuff uh than this video. But you know in the context of using it to showcase like a logo or or a decal or anything. Uh hopefully this is a good tutorial. So if you like this do me a big favor. Uh if you haven't already, please go to designcourse.com, check out what is there. Um right now the uh official course relaunch is not ready, but uh if you're watching this down the road and it is, you know, please check it out. Also check out in the description the different uh social networks that I'm a part of, please like them on Facebook, uh Twitter, Google, uh and of course here on YouTube, please subscribe. Uh, all right. So, if you have any questions, go ahead and just post in the comments and I will try to comment. All right. Thanks and until next time, I will see you then. Goodbye.